Background information

At one of the power plants in southern Germany, it used to be the practice in the past that the technician had to drive to the respective power plant by car in order to switch it ON or OFF on the basis of an optimization result. Yes, even in 2020 this is still the case in many places. A classic control system with process mapping is one possibility. A simpler, pure monitoring and control solution is the economically ideal way. In the Automation business unit, the Clouver solution has been used for years for such tasks on machine tools. In Energy 4.0, “power generation machines” have very similar requirements.

Why Clouver? 

The optimization software and Clouver now communicate with each other, transferring power plant schedules several times a day. This is done in encrypted form via the lean internet protocol MQTT. Clouver stores these and then passes them on to the respective generating units.

The power plants return status reports to Clouver every minute. All important data, such as basic status (ON, OFF, fault, productive, standby), target power and actual power are displayed live in Clouver. A gateway with PLC functionality is used as the transfer medium in the control cabinet of the plant.

The Clouver solution was extended in the course by important, scalable puzzle pieces:

• Manual, location-independent interventions in running processes
• Interfaces from third-party software to Clouver
• Gateway with PLC functionality
• Full remote functionality via LTE router
• LTE connectivity as part of the overall solution

Result

Now the technician can remotely engage and make corrections in case of deviations in production performance. In addition to saving time, immediate response to deviations in generation output saves cash. Within the scope of a manageable project, impressive benefit enhancements have been created. 

Both, pure machine builders and machine operators, benefit from the new functionalities.